Eric Bruno

Dr. Dobb's Bloggers

JavaFX On Wall Street

September 30, 2011

At JavaOne on Monday, October 3rd, at 5:30pm a the Nikko Hotel, I'll be presenting a session called JavaFX on Wall Street. I'll be joined by Torkel Svanes, where we will describe the large Java Swing based financial application that we've incorporated JavaFX into.
The main driver for this work was to move it into the 21st century, as we say, ...

At JavaOne on Monday, October 3rd, at 5:30pm at the Nikko Hotel, I'll be presenting a session called JavaFX on Wall Street. I'll be joined by Torkel Svanes, where we will describe the large Java Swing based financial application that we've incorporated JavaFX into.

The main driver for this work was to move it into the 21st century and incorporate new UI elements such as animation and multi-media. This type of work is easy to do in JavaFX, and much harder in Swing. We'll describe the steps we took to integrate our custom JavaFX components into Swing, which is not officially supported by the JavaFX 1.3.1 platform.

Next, we'll actually demonstrate the new JavaFX-based work to the audience, and describe the future plans we have for JavaFX 2.0.

All of this comes down to two basic questions: Why did we choose JavaFX, and why didn't we choose something like Flash or Silverlight?

The answer is very simple. We believe in Oracle's vision for the future of JavaFX, and we don't think it's going away. Also, it was a logical choice for this application, as there is an existing large base of Java code that JavaFX can integrate with well. With Flash or Silverlight, or any other technology for that matter, it would have meant a rewrite of the entire application. JavaFX allowed us to achieve the same UI results, and saved a lot of time and money in that it allowed us to r-use all of the existing Java code in the application.

JavaFX 2.0, with its Java APIs and full Java integration — including what Oracle says will be official Swing integration — will only make these types of choices easier. Watch out Flash and Silverlight! JavaFX 2.0 is coming to town.

I'm hoping Oracle will talk about its HTML5 plans for JavaFX 2.0 at JavaOne this year. From what they hinted at last year at JavaOne, the plan is to take the new Prism renderer within JavaFX 2.0 and have it render HTML5 code for JavaFX components when they are run in the browser.

For the developer, this is key. It means we can write our JavaFX code once, and have it render on the desktop within a JVM, and on the browser via HTML5 without changing any source code. Can this vision be achieved? Hopefully we'll find out at JavaOne.

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